Boys' Column.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XX, Issue 2087, 1 July 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

Boys' Column.

The All-Round Boy.

(iTh rper's Toung People')

There are many ways of learning a thing. Ton want to know how manypints thers may be in a quart. There are the “ tables of weights and measures ’’ in the arithmetic, and you can read and remember that “ two pints make one quart.” And when you repeat it correctly, and go to the head of the class, yon may not be able to provo it, or even bo able to remember it for more than a week. That is one way to learn. There is another and a far better way now used in many schools. Yon borrow a pint measure and a quart measure, and then fill the pint measure with water and poor it into the quart. The big measure is not full. It will hold more. Fill the pint measure again, and add it to the water in the quart measure. Tice, as plain as can be, and not a drop to spare. Two pints are equal to one quart; in other words, one quart measure will hold twice as much as one pint. So it seems there are two ways of learning the “ tables."

There are many young folks who think going to school a dull business. It is dull, if you go to the wrong kind of school. Committing lessons to memory and repeating the right answers in the class' is often a dull business indeed. Why, fishing is a great deal more amusing. A fellow with a fishing rod and a boat leams a great many things, and he is not obliged to recite all the things he learns about bait, books, and oars, sails, steering, and all the rest, in order to remember them. Anybody can remember such things without trouble and without once looking in a book. How much better it would be it school kept out-of-doors, and the teacher was a good stroke oar, and knew how to get up a sail and steer in a stiff breeze, and other clever things like that 1 School would bs vacation all the year round, and every one would be at the head of the class.

If you took the cars on Sixth Avenue in New York and went uptown, you would find a school on West Fifty-fourth Street that ie much like this—a school where the boys and girls learn the “ tables” by using real pints and quarts, foot-rules and yard-sticks, and where the teachers can do more clever things than steering a boat or landing a pickerel, It is a play-school where a jack-knife is as good as a book, and where the scholars write exercises in their writing-books, and then turn the lessons into real things they can carry home in their pockets. There are books it is true. Books are delightful teachers, because they will repeat the lessons over whenever you wish, and never say a word about sitting up straight and folding the arms. Nobody could get along without books, so they are to be found in this school just the same as in your schools. There is however a difference. You start off in the morning with a bagful of books, and it is nothing but lessons out of books all day long. In this school nobody studies a book more than an hour and a half, and then comes something else that would seem to you more like fun than study. Suppose you were a small man or a little woman, and you were so lucky as to go to this school in West Fifty-fourth Street. Being very young, you would enter the handsome school-house, that seems to look mote like a large house where pleasant people may live, and go to the Kindergarten. They do indeed. It is play, but somehow, when they have played every day for a year or more, these little fellows can tell you many things that “ grown-ups ” never learned. Being too old for Kindergarten, you go to the next older claases. There is for the first hour nothing wonderful. Lessons to learn, f 8 * n school. Arithmetic, perhaps. The book says that “ four and two make six," and that 11 four times one is four.” You commit these things to memory from the book, and can say them correctly. Suddenly study stops, and the whole class troops upstairs in a procession to another room. Such a strange school 1 In place of desks there are tables, and instead of books there are a pencil, a ruler, some pieces of brown paper, a knife, a square, and a lump of white clay. You take the pencil and paper, and the teacher says every one is to make a dot on one corner of the sheet. Then another dot on the opposite corner. Now join the dots with a straight line with the pencil and ruler. Why, this is not school. It’s play. On the lesson goes, and pretty soon a square figure is made on the paper. How many lines are there 1 Four, one on each side. How much is four times one ? Why, how plain that is! The foursided figure is made of one line on each side, and there are just four. Now for the lump of clay and the knife. Set up the drawing on the desk and copy it with the knife on the clay. Then cut the clay away outside of the lines. Why, that makes a solid square. Let us count the sides. There are four—one on each side—and there is the top and the bottom. Four and two are six. Count them. Yes, just six. Why, this is the lesson from the book.

You may be older still, and go to the classroom to study grammar and history and other matters. Not more than ninety minutes over the books, and then comes work in the shop. More pencil and paper, for, of all things, drawing is the most important. The drawing lesson over, there is wet clay to be fashioned into the the shapes we have been drawing. So the school day goes on, books and tools,writing lessons and drawing lessons, study, and then beautiful work in clay, copying lovely figures of animals. Hero is a portrait of a boy in this school. He began, perhaps, in the Kindergarten and worked up to this high class in clay. He has drawn a big apron over his school suit, and stands with a lump of soft clay in his hand studying the small iignrc of the lion on the table. Before him on the bench is the larger figure he is building up in clay as a copy of the smaller figure. Behind him in the bookcase are the lessons in real things he and other boys have made in other classes. The lion he is making shows he is a splendid workman. Already the head is well shaped out, and one big paw is nearly finished. At the same time, we may be sure that the boy is well advanced in the things yon learn from books.

Are there no girls ? Many girls in every class, but when they reach a certain stage in the workshop studies they take up needlework, as befits a girl, and make designs from flowers and embroider them in silk or learn to cut and make their own dresses. The older boys go on to other studies, and use lathes, scroll-saws, and the file and hammer in wood and metal work, and will graduate at last with high honors, and make a model steam-engine as a graduating exercise. In all the studies of this school, books and tools go together. There arc lessons to be made at the work bench. U very where work and reading, writing and drawing from the youngest Kindergartener to the graduates who write 'reports on the skeletons of birds and fishes, read essays in history and perform experiments in chemistry. It would seem to you a play-school. It is really a work-school, and everybody knows that work is only a pleasure if you know why you work, and that lessons from a book are never dull, if the same lesson is afterward done over again with a knife or a scroll-saw.

This school is called “ the working man's school,” yet we must not make the mistake of thinking that the boys and girls who come out of the school will be only working-men. That is not the plan. The school is meant to make " all-round boys.” An " all-round boy ” is one who can work with his hands as well as with his head, a buy who knows something of many things, who can do many things—draw as well as write, turn wood or file iron as well as par-c a sentence. An ” all-round girl ’ is on-- who knows how to draw from nature, dam a stocking, and make a pie, as well as write a fair hand, or do aught that any girl can do who has graduated with honors from the grammar-school,